Tag Archives: rock

"What appeals to me is the potency in the image -- the object itself, or the mysterious atmosphere it holds. A truly beautiful image has the power open up this whole inner world; it's like a visual "key" that unlocks and fires up your imagination." - Alice Cohen

"My collaboration with [Oliver] Chanarin began with a love of didactic images: images that explain things; how to resuscitate a dying man, or put a chain on your chihuahua, or fall over without hurting yourself. These are images made with a certain purpose, but they can be very beautiful too. Accidentally beautiful, which is what...

"A lot of the symbolism is all centered around the ideas of unity and transcendence, death and rebirth, and the infinity of everything. When I first heard the song, I kept seeing this movement of traveling through multidimensional space and transforming landscapes, and the chorus was definitely always moments of opening and clarity." - Johnny...

First things first about Parquet Courts’ new Sunbathing Animal, for everyone who went mental over Light Up Gold: it doesn’t cohere as well as its predecessor, in which all the songs flowed naturally and felt of a piece. Parquet Courts have been touring endlessly, and Sunbathing Animal often gives off the feel that the band...Read...

Folklorists like to romanticize blues music as being a pure expression of culture, but recorded blues music was carefully marketed to its intended audience from its very beginning. As early as the 1920s, music aimed at African-Americans was labeled as "race music", and the best way to advertise it was in the pages of African-American...

Drawing obvious inspiration from timelessness and less obvious inspiration from Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck, director Vinyl Williams takes Dub Thompson’s “No Time” and turns it into a multi-level philosophical exercise. Williams explores the slippery nature of existence by using both HD and analog techniques, which ebb, flow, and spin within a mad cycle, in...Read...

Yearling, the second album from Orcas — the collaboration of Thomas Meluch, better known as Benoît Pioulard, and Rafael Anton Irissari, who also makes graceful ambient shoegaze under the name The Sight Below — seems very intent on a time and a place. In this case, a summer in Germany, where most of these songs...Read...

Here is a quick summary of GOAT, and the story is meant to be taken with as many grains of salt as possible. GOAT originally hail from Korpilombo, Sweden, from a community that has a history of voodoo worship. At various times, the incarnation of GOAT has lived on for 30 or 40 years amongst...Read...

On their newest LP, Electric Balloon, New York’s Ava Luna offer a solid rock and R&B framework infused with the pulse of experimental music. The result is something they call “nervous soul” — experimental rock that is as texturally interesting as it is emotionally invigorating. As soon as Electric Balloon begins, its simple grouping of...Read...

I spent a long time thinking about how to write this album review of Linda Perhacs’ new album, The Soul of All Natural Things, the follow-up to Perhacs’ 1970 album Paralellograms and her first new record in 44 years. Paralellograms is a cult classic, and cult classics capture the imagination in part because they stand...Read...